The Herbalist: Nicholas Culpeper and the Fight for Medical Freedom

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Lessons had to be learned, and Attersoll was uncompromising. The Bible was held over the boy, and its message battered into his head. God, like kings, expected unconditional obedience. Those set over us are put there by God, and it is his will that we submit to them, Attersoll believed. ‘Evil parents are our parents, and evil Magistrates are Magistrates, and evil Ministers are Ministers’, and, though he dare not write it, evil kings are kings – the position that underlay the belief of England’s monarchs since Henry VIII in their divine right to rule and expectation of unquestioning obedience from their subjects. ‘Servants are commanded to be subject to their masters, not only unto them that are good and gentle, but them that are froward [perverse], so ought children to yield obedience unto their fathers.’

Underlying this tough message was Attersoll’s belief in predestination. This was one of the central tenets of Protestant theology, and at the time Attersoll was writing accepted by both the established Church and Puritan radicals.

God, went the argument, must know in advance who will be saved – the ‘elect’, as theologians called them – and who will be damned. If he did not, then it meant he did not have perfect knowledge of the future, which suggested that his divine powers were limited. Attersoll found confirmation of this principle in the Book of Numbers. The book took its name from the census performed by Moses when the Israelites entered the wilderness of Sinai. ‘We learn from hence,’ argued Attersoll, ‘that the Lord knoweth perfectly who [his people] are.’ But his people, being but human and without perfect knowledge, do not know if they are among the elect. The signs were in their behaviour, which showed whether they tended towards godliness or wickedness. For example, rebellious acts, obstructions in the river of godly authority flowing from heaven, were symptoms of a wicked disposition.

In this fateful atmosphere, every act was subjected to providential scrutiny. The most trivial prank could mean the child was doomed, as deadly a sign as a cough indicating consumption. And whichever destiny was signified, salvation or damnation, nothing could be done about it. ‘God keepeth a tally … & none are hidden from him, none escape his knowledge, or sight.’

No absolution could be provided, no repentance sought, no comfort or consolation given. Every time Nicholas broke the ‘bands asunder’ and cast off ‘the cords of duty and discipline’, and the admonishing finger directed him into the dark, it was not the bogeyman who awaited him there, but Satan.

The daylight world of the scullery was Nicholas’s escape from this predestinarian tyranny. This was where the women were, his adoring mother Mary, wives from the village, the maid. Here, salvation and damnation were replaced by blood and guts. Peeping over counter-tops, crouched in a corner, scurrying alongside blooming skirts, he could watch the preparation of meals and medicines, the skinning of a ‘coney’ (rabbit), its fur being dipped in beaten egg white and applied to heels that were ‘kibed’ or chapped by worn and ill-fitting shoes; cowslips being candied in layers of sugar; tangles of fibrous toadflax being laid in the water bowls to revive ‘drooping’ chickens.

No fear of religious instruction here. Women were not expected to engage in such pursuits, at least not in Attersoll’s household. He acknowledged that there were ‘many examples of learned women’, his own daughter perhaps among them; but the Bible ‘requireth of them to be in subjection, not to challenge dominion’ of male discourse. The ‘frailness and weakness’ of their sex made them ‘easier to be seduced and deceived, and so fitter to be authors of much mischief’.

Their place was in the pantry, their role to preserve the frail body, while the male ministry of Attersoll administered to the soul.

Thus, in the company of women, Nicholas encountered the more practical arts of nurturing and healing. Food and physic, chores and hygiene, were inextricably entwined. Here Mary, her awareness sharpened by the tragedy in Ockley, would treat wounds and mix medicines, as well as feed the family and clean the house, using traditional recipes, ingredients and methods handed down the generations, or shared through the village.

The supplies needed to sustain this regime all came through the back door, and it was a young boy’s job to go and fetch them. Outside lay one of the most beautiful and botanically rich areas of the country, a fertile valley on the southern fringes of the Ashdown Forest, the enchanted place into which future generations of children were enticed when A. A. Milne made it the setting for Winnie the Pooh’s Hundred Acre Wood. This landscape became Nicholas’s catechism, the meadows and woods his Sinai desert, the local names of medicinal flowers and shrubs his census of the elect. He attained an intimate botanical knowledge of Sussex, learning, for example, where to find such ingredients as ‘fleur-de-luce’ (elsewhere known as wild pansy, orris, love-in-idleness, and heartsease, the constituent of Puck’s love potion in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream) and ‘langue-de-boeuf’ (bugloss or borage), noting in later life how their ‘Francified’ names echoed the Norman invasion, which had taken place in 1066 at nearby Hastings.

He heard the women talk of the use of lady‘s mantle to revive sagging breasts, syrup of stinking arrach

to ward off ‘strangulation of the mother’ (period pains), honeysuckle ointment to soothe skin sunburned by summer days in the fields. They talked of ‘kneeholm’ (‘holm’ is the Old English for holly), ‘dogwood’, ‘greenweed’, and ‘brakes’, the local names for butcher’s-broom, common alder, wold, and bracken. He discovered how every plant had its use, even one as predatory and toxic as brakes. Bracken was, and is, everywhere in Sussex. He would find it erupting in nearby woodland, wherever the undergrowth was disturbed by human activity, harassing stockmen who, during parched summers, would have to drive their animals away from grazing on its fronds, which are suffused with a form of cyanide. Yet the roots, bruised and boiled in mead or honeyed water, could be applied to boys’ itching bottoms to get rid of threadworm. A shovel-load of the burning leaves carried through the house would drive away the gnats and other ‘noisome’ creatures that ‘molest people lying in their beds’ in such ‘fenny’ places as the Sussex lowlands.

In the graveyard of his grandfather’s church he would pick clary,

a wild sage, the leaves of which, battered and butter-fried, helped strengthen weak backs. Wandering further up the valley towards the neighbouring village of Barcombe, following the lazy course of the Ouse, negotiating the network of sluices and ditches draining off into the river, he would visit a clump of black alder trees standing next to the brooks and peel back the speckled outer bark to reveal the yellow phloem, or inner bark. Chewed, it turned spittle the colour of saffron; sucked too vigorously, or swallowed, it provoked violent vomiting; but boiled with handfuls of hops and fennel, the grated root of garden succory, or wild endive, and left for a few days, it turned into a bitter, black liquor which, taken every morning, drew down the excess of phlegm and bile that during winter accumulated in the body like the floodwater in the fields outside.

In these fields, he pored over the book of nature in the same fine detail as his grandfather combed the book of God inside. However, when Nicholas was ten, his days of wandering the countryside came to an abrupt end. Attersoll decided the boy needed a more formal education. He was packed off to a Sussex ‘Free School’ ‘at the cost and charges of his mother’ – probably the grammar school in Lewes, six miles away, or perhaps further afield, where he could no longer disturb his grandfather’s work.

Attersoll had also decided upon a vocation for the boy. ‘Every one must know & learn the duties of his own special calling,’ he wrote, and, like Attersoll’s more dutiful son William junior, Nicholas’s was to be the Church. At school, he would learn Latin, a prerequisite for an education in divinity, and a preparation for university.

Nicholas was sent to Cambridge in 1632, when he was sixteen years old. Little is known about his time there. He may have gone to his father’s college, Queens’, or to his grandfather’s, Peterhouse.

In any case he would have followed the standard curriculum of the time, covering the seven ‘liberal arts’ – first the core subjects of grammar, logic, and rhetoric, followed by arithmetic, music, geometry, and astronomy. The way these subjects were taught rested on the authority of the text. Teachers would read out sections from set books, mostly by classical authors, all in Latin, elucidating where necessary. These were gospel. Students were not expected to question or challenge them, only to study and gloss them.

Nicholas’s mother had given him £400 for his ‘diet, schooling, and being at the university’. This was a lot of money, and it is not clear where she got it from – certainly not from the ‘poor labourer’ Attersoll, nor from her late husband’s estate (Nicholas senior’s short career more likely diminished than increased his £120 inheritance). Perhaps it was donated by a benefactor, a Culpeper relative such as Sir Edward’s son William, who had recently inherited his father’s title and estate and would later be described by Nicholas as a godfather figure. Or it may have come from a member of the local gentry to whom Attersoll dedicated his books, such as Sir John Shurley, owner of Isfield Manor.

Wherever it came from, £400 was enough for a comfortable life, leaving a sufficient surplus after board, lodging, and fees for a young student, later famous for his ‘consumption of the purse’, to develop an indulgence, such as smoking tobacco.

Nicholas’s passion for smoking was legendary. Even friends accepted that he took ‘too excessively’ to tobacco. It was the rage in 1630s Cambridge, attracting ‘smoky gallants, who have long time glutted themselves with the fond fopperies and fashions of our neighbour Countries’ and were ‘desirous of novelties’. Smoke-filled student chambers and taverns were an exhilarating change from the stuffy rooms of his grandfather’s cottage, and so were the apothecary shops that acted as the main outlets for tobacco, with their snakeskins and turtleshells in the window, and smells of incense, herbs, and vinegars inside.

Tobacco had been in the country since Elizabethan times. Its introduction to England is attributed to Sir Walter Raleigh, but it was already known before Raleigh’s voyages to America in the 1580s. In 1577, an English translation of an influential herbal by the Spanish physician Nicolas Monardes appeared under the poetic title Ioyfull Nevves out of the Newe Founde Worlde. An entry for ‘the Tabaco, and of his great virtues’ appeared prominently among a variety of exotic discoveries, such as ‘Herbs of the Sun’ (sunflowers), coca, and the ‘Fig Tree from Hell’. Monardes dwelt mostly on tobacco’s medicinal virtues (he claimed it was effective for treating headaches, chest complaints, and the worms), which he had exploited in his own practice in Seville. But he also included a detailed and scintillating report of a religious ritual performed by ‘Indian priests’ in America that had been observed by Spanish explorers. The priest would cast dried tobacco leaves upon a fire and ‘receive the smoke of them at his mouth, and at his nose with a cane, and in taking of it [fall] down upon the ground, as a dead man’. ‘In like sort,’ Monardes added, ‘the rest of the Indians for their pastime do take the smoke of the Tabaco, for to make themselves drunk withal, and to see the visions, and things that do represent to them, wherein they do delight … And as the Devil is a deceiver, and hath the knowledge of the virtue of herbs, he did shew them the virtue of this herb, that by the means thereof, they might see their imaginations, and visions, that he hath represented to them, and by that means doth deceive them.’ For this reason, Monardes placed the herb among a class of herbs ‘which have the virtue in dreaming of things’, hallucinogenics such as the root of ‘solarto’ (Belladonna or Deadly Nightshade), which, taken in wine, ‘is very strange and furious … and doth make him that taketh it dream of things variable’. Such properties encouraged English merchants with Spanish contacts to source samples of the herb for an eager market back home. The translator of Ioyfull Nevves, John Frampton, noted in the book’s dedication to the poet and diplomat Edward Dyer how the ‘medicines’ Monardes mentioned ‘are now by merchants and others brought out of the West Indies into Spain, and from Spain hither into England, by such as do daily traffic thither’.

The tobacco plant featured in Nicolas Morandes’s herbal.

England, however, was at war with Spain during the latter years of the sixteenth century, and tobacco remained a rarity. That all changed in the 1620s, when bountiful supplies of a sweet, pungent variety, superior even by Spanish standards, began to be cultivated in England’s newly-established colony of Virginia in North America, fuelling a surge in consumption.

The sudden spread of such a potent herb among the young alarmed the authorities. In the House of Commons, knights of the shires demanded that it be banned ‘for the spoiling of the Subjects’ Manners’. In his Directions for Health, first published in 1600 and one of the most popular medical books of the time, William Vaughan warned against the ‘pleasing ease and sensible deliverance’ experienced by young smokers, and, targeting his health-warning at the area that was likely to cause them greatest concern, urged them ‘to take heed how they waste the oil of their vital lamps’. ‘Repeat over these plain rhymes,’ he instructed:

Tobacco, that outlandish weed,

It spends the brain, and spoils the seed:

It dulls the sprite, it dims the fight,

It robs a woman of her right.

The sternest critic was King James himself. In 1604, he published his Counterblaste to Tobacco, in which he condemned the ‘manifold abuses of this vile custom of tobacco taking’. ‘With the report of a great discovery for a Conquest,’ he wrote, recalling Sir Walter Raleigh’s voyages to colonize Virginia, ‘some two or three Savage men were brought in together with this Savage custom. But the pity is, the poor wild barbarous men died, but that vile barbarous custom is yet alive, yea in fresh vigour.’

The King was particularly affronted by the medicinal powers claimed for the plant. It had been advertised as a cure for the pox, for example, but for James ‘it serves for that use but among the pocky Indian slaves’. He examined in detail its toxic effects, displaying an impressive grasp of prevailing medical theories. Following the intellectual fashion of the time, he also drew an important metaphorical conclusion about his own role in dealing with such issues: he was ‘the proper Physician of his Politic-body’ whose job was ‘to purge it of all those diseases by Medicines meet for the same’.

But even the efforts of an absolute monarch could not stop the spread of this pernicious habit. ‘Oh, the omnipotent power of tobacco!’ he fumed, consigning it to the same class of intractabilities as religious extremism: ‘If it could by the smoke thereof chase out devils … it would serve for a precious relic, both for the superstitious priests and the insolent Puritans, to call out devils withal.’

His ravings had no effect on consumption. Imports of tobacco boomed: 2,300 pounds in 1615, 20,000 in 1619, 40,000 in 1620, 55,000 in 1621, two million pounds a year by 1640.

The more popular it became, the more James found that even he could not do without it. ‘It is not unknown what dislike We have ever had of the use of Tobacco, as tending to a general and new corruption, both of men’s bodies and manners,’ the King announced in a proclamation of 1619; nevertheless, he considered ‘it is … more tolerable, that the same should be imported amongst many other vanities and superfluities’ because, without it, ‘it doth manifestly tend to the diminution of our Customs’.

In other words, the health risks of smoking were less important than his need for money.

James’s fiscal needs were certainly pressing. Since the reign of Elizabeth, finance had been a source of growing tension between the monarchy, Parliament, and members of the upper and ‘middling’ classes of society rich enough to pay taxes. Under England’s often anomalous constitutional arrangements, the King, though an absolute monarch, had to summon a Parliament – representing the nobility and the bishops in the House of Lords, mostly the landowning, professional, and merchant classes in the Commons – if he wanted to raise taxes. James had several sources of private revenue, such as rents and fines, but their value had eroded during a period of escalating inflation.

Thus he was forced on several occasions to summon Parliament and haggle over his income, a process that tended to force some of the extravagances and corruptions of his court humiliatingly into the light. His response was to look for more private ways of raising money that did not require parliamentary consent. He borrowed heavily from the City of London, a ready source of money but provided, as events later showed, with strings. He started selling titles. He invented the lower rank of ‘baronet’, aimed at members of the gentry such as Sir Edward Culpeper, which offered the prestige of nobility without the prerogatives. He exploited feudal privileges such as ‘wardships’, a royal right to the income from estates inherited by under-age heirs. However, his most lucrative source of revenue was customs duties. These were notionally under the control of Parliament but, following a convention established in the reign of Edward IV, were granted to James for the duration of his reign. Taking advantage of the concession, he supplemented the income they generated with special duties or ‘impositions’ levied on particular goods. A test case brought in 1606 by a merchant who refused to pay the imposition on a hundredweight of currants affirmed that James was entitled to the money, on the grounds that the royal prerogative was ‘absolute’. The custom duty due on tobacco was 2d. per pound weight in 1604. James initially increased it more than fortyfold by adding an impost of 6s. 10d. a pound, a rate so punitive it proved unenforceable and had to be reduced. Exploiting another controversial privilege, he then granted a patent for control of the entire tobacco trade to a court favourite, who in return for the right to ‘farm’ the duties was expected to pay up to £15,000 a year into the royal exchequer. Later still, he allowed for the practice of ‘garbling’, imposing an obligation on merchants to have their goods checked and sealed by an official. It was claimed such a measure was needed to prevent the sale of bad or adulterated tobacco, but in practice it was used to increase revenue, as the officials began to charge a further 4d. per pound for passing each bale of tobacco. Such prescriptions set the tone not only of James’s fiscal policy, but also that of his heir, Charles I – a purgative applied by these physicians of the ‘Politic-body’ that would result in the most dreadful convulsions.

As well as being embroiled in such political controversies, tobacco was associated with intellectual ones as well. Critics disapprovingly noted that the herb carried the endorsement of philosophers such as Giambattista della Porta. Della Porta’s Natural Magick (first published in Latin in 1558 as Magiae naturalis) was one of a series of notorious sixteenth-century works that contained combustible mixes of herbalism, medicine, religion, magic, alchemy, and astrology. Such works had inspired a flowering of interest in magic in England, and particularly at Cambridge University, encouraged by Queen Elizabeth’s magus Dr John Dee (who had noted the properties of tobacco in his copy of Monardes’ herbal) and reflected in works such as Spenser’s Faerie Queene and Shakespeare’s The Tempest. In later years, tobacco also became associated with religious fanaticism. A sect called the Ranters thought that, since predestination meant that your fate in the next life was fixed, you may as well make the most of this one, and so smoking (along with drinking, feasting, and whoring) became elevated to a sacrament. Even the more sober Baptists were partial to a smoke during their services.

Thus, a pipe of tobacco in the early seventeenth century took the smoker on a heady botanical, political, and philosophical, as well as recreational, trip. This made it all the more appealing to a young Cambridge undergraduate with a curious mind and a full pocket. It was also the reason why the university authorities tried to ban smoking. They failed, or even had the reverse effect, and Nicholas was one among many who enjoyed flouting the prohibition.

Anticipating future generations of students, Nicholas may even have grown his own. He was certainly well acquainted in later life with ‘yellow henbane’, a variety of tobacco that he thought originated in Brazil and was now widespread in England. He knew what it looked like, and where it grew. He described the saffron juice derived from the leaves as an effective expectorant for ‘tough phlegm’. He also later noted in one of his medical books that the bruised leaves ‘applied to the place aggrieved by the king’s evil’ would alleviate discomfort. ‘Indeed,’ he added, ‘a man might fill a whole volume with the virtues of it.’

Given the context, this must surely have been a mischievous reference to royal disapproval of the domestic weed.

In 1619, James, under pressure from the settlers in Virginia and enticed by the prospect of greater revenues, issued a proclamation banning the cultivation of tobacco in England (which, being domestically grown, was free of excise duties and impositions). His grounds were that the ‘Inland plantation’ had allowed tobacco to ‘become promiscuous, and begun to be taken in every mean Village even amongst the basest people’, and because ‘divers persons of skill and experience’ had told him that the English variety was ‘more crude, poisonous and dangerous’ than the Virginian. The same disapproving policy continued into the reign of Charles I, who took further measures to monopolize its importation and to license its sale, on the grounds that it was ‘taken for wantonness and excess’.

Nicholas evidently saw smoking as a badge of the anti-authoritarianism that was to define his career, and it seems the two were combined into an intoxicating mix in his Cambridge days. However, it was another act of rebellion that was to have the most decisive influence on his forthcoming career.

The story is related in the most melodramatic style in a short, anonymous memoir concerning Nicholas that appeared in the introduction to a posthumous edition of one of his works:

One of the first Diversions that he had amongst some other smaller transactions and changes, none of his Life proving more unfortunate, was that he had engaged himself in the Love of a Beautiful Lady; I shall not name her for some reasons; her Father was reported to be one of the noblest and wealthiest in Sussex.

The identity of the lady remains a mystery. She had a personal estate worth £2,000 and a private income of £500 a year, according to the memoir, figures consistent with the wealth of, say, the daughter of a rich baronet, such as Sir John Shurley (1569–1631). Sir John was the owner of the manor of Isfield, and had an extended family that included a few possible candidates.

If the lady belonged to the Shurley clan, it is easy to see why Nicholas kept the love affair secret. Sir John was William Attersoll’s patron. Attersoll dedicated two of his books to Sir John, and became a beneficiary of the baronet’s will in 1631 – the time that the adolescent intensities of Nicholas’s illicit love affair presumably came into flower in the woodlands around Isfield, and just before they were interrupted by his departure for Cambridge.

Nicholas was no match for a rich member of one of the most ancient and respected families in the county. He may have been a Culpeper, but he was from an inferior branch. The very suggestion of such a relationship would have caused his grandfather great embarrassment. ‘Parents have often too severe eyes over their Children’, as the memoir observed, and Nicholas knew only too well that Attersoll would bring down the wrath of an Old Testament God upon such a union. So the couple decided upon their ‘Martyrdoms’ – an elopement. ‘By letters and otherwise’ they plotted to meet in Lewes, where they were to be married in secret ‘and afterwards for a season … live privately till the incensed parents were pacified’.

On the appointed day, probably some time in 1633 or early 1634, the lady and one of her maids hid among their skirts ‘such Rich Jewels and other necessaries as might best appertain to a Journey’, while Nicholas pocketed the £200 left over from the money his mother had given him for his education at Cambridge. The Romeo set off by coach, the Juliet by foot, to rendezvous at the chapel in Lewes, where a priest waited to perform their secret nuptials.

As he approached his destination, news reached Nicholas of a providential intervention. As his bride-to-be and her companion were making their way across the Downs they were ‘suddenly surprised with a dreadful storm, with fearful claps of Thunder surrounded with flames of Fire and flashes of Lightning, with some of which Mr Culpeper’s fair Mistress was so stricken, that she immediately fell down dead’. A family friend passed by Nicholas’s coach as he received the news and took the distraught young man to the rectory at Isfield. The unexpected appearance of her son filled Nicholas’s mother with joy, until she became aware of the circumstances that had brought him there. The shock, according to the memoir, struck her down with an illness from which she would never recover.

Nicholas’s relationship with Attersoll was also terminally injured. It was yet more evidence of the young man’s irredeemable rebelliousness. ‘If we have warned them, and they would not be warned,’ Attersoll thundered in one of his biblical commentaries, ‘if we taught and trained them up in the fear of God, which is the beginning of wisdom, and they have broken the bands asunder, and cast the cords of duty and discipline from them, we may comfort our selves as the Minister doth, when he seeth his labour is spent in vain.’

Attersoll disinherited his ward, and gave up on his religious education.

Nicholas left Cambridge in a state of ‘deep melancholy’. He could not stay in Sussex either; so, like many others who find themselves in need of a fresh start and a new life, he set off for that refuge of the dispossessed: London, where for a while he disappears from the historical record and our story, as others take centre stage.

* This and the following extracts introducing each chapter are taken from Culpeper’s The English Physitian.